Jeremiah 17:1

Jeremiah prophesied in the last decades of the kingdom of Judah, from the days of King Josiah’s reforms to the Babylonian exile (about 627 to 586 BC). Josiah worked earnestly to restore true worship, yet the people kept going back to idols, to the mixing of the LORD’s worship with pagan rites, and to oppression. Chapter 16 has just announced how severe the coming exile will be, and chapter 17 opens by giving the reason.

“The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond.” These are the tools of an engraver, who cut inscriptions into stone or metal so that the record would last. Job longed for a record of that kind when he wished that his words “were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever” (Job 19:24). The word behind “diamond”, shâmîyr, names the hardest of stones, probably the diamond, and the KJV renders it “adamant” in Ezekiel 3:9. The verb “graven”, chârash, means to engrave, and it is also used for ploughing, so it speaks of a mark cut deep into a surface. The word for sin, chaṭṭâʼâh, is the usual one, and it is also the word for a sin offering. Here it covers the settled rebellion of the whole nation, and its idolatry most of all.

The picture tells us that Judah’s sin stands as a lasting record before God. It stays where it is through every ritual and every passing show of repentance, and only God can remove it.

Verse 2 shows how far the engraving has gone: “Whilst their children remember their altars and their groves by the green trees upon the high hills.” The word for children, bên, means a son, and here it takes in the rising generation. The verb zâkar is the ordinary word for remembering. The setting gives it its weight, because these altars are still standing and still in use, and the children hold them in mind as their own places of worship and carry the practice on.

There is a bitter irony here. Israel was told to remember the LORD and the way he had led them (Deuteronomy 8:2). God gave his law so that each generation would teach the next, and so that the children would turn out unlike their stubborn and rebellious fathers (Psalm 78:5–8). In Judah the thing handed down from parent to child was idolatry.

In verse 3 the LORD speaks to the land itself: “O my mountain in the field.” The word hârâr means a mountain or hill, from a root meaning to loom up. The mountain is Jerusalem, or the whole land of Judah, and it may point to Mount Zion, where the temple stood. The word “my” tells us whose it is, and the LORD still calls this place his own while he pronounces judgment on it. “In the field” (sâdeh) sets the mountain in open country, exposed to attack with its protection gone. Isaiah had seen “the mountain of the LORD’s house” exalted above the hills, with all nations flowing to it (Isaiah 2:2–4). Jeremiah sees that mountain laid open to the spoiler.

“I will give thy substance and all thy treasures to the spoil.” “Substance” (chayil) is wealth, resources and strength, “treasures” (ʼôwtsâr) are stored riches, and “spoil” (baz) is plunder. The one who hands them over is God himself. The armies of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar would do the plundering, and they would be his instrument. The word was carried out when the king of Babylon took “all the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king’s house” (2 Kings 24:13). Moses had warned of this long before, when he said that a people who refused to serve the LORD with gladness in their abundance would serve their enemies “in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things” (Deuteronomy 28:47–48).

The heritage, nachălâh, is an inheritance, an estate handed down. For Israel it was the land of Canaan, which God gave to Abraham’s descendants. It was their home, their security and the visible sign of their covenant with him. Verse 4 adds “that I gave thee”, so that Judah hears again that the land was a gift. Their hold on it depended on covenant faithfulness, and the law had warned that an unfaithful people would be removed from the land (Deuteronomy 28:63) and scattered among the nations while it lay desolate (Leviticus 26:32–33).

The verb “discontinue”, shâmaṭ, is the one used in Exodus 23:11 for letting the land “rest and lie still” in the seventh year. A people who had withheld the land’s rest would now be made to let go of the land itself, and in their absence the land would enjoy its sabbaths (Leviticus 26:34). “And thou, even thyself” presses the responsibility home, since the loss comes by Judah’s own doing.

“I will cause thee to serve thine enemies.” The verb ʻâbad means to work, to serve or to till, and here it is forced service under foreign masters. God had brought this people out of slavery in Egypt, and their sin now sends them back into bondage. “The land which thou knowest not” adds the strangeness of exile, far from home and from everything familiar. It came to pass when Jerusalem fell and the people were carried away to Babylon (2 Kings 25).

These verses show a need that only God can meet. Sin is cut into the heart, and it has reached the altar itself. Jeremiah is given the answer in the promise of the new covenant, and Ezekiel hears it too, when God promises a new heart and a new spirit and his own Spirit within his people (Ezekiel 36:26–27).

That promise is kept in Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). The record that iron and diamond had fixed, God blots out at the cross, where the handwriting that stood against us was taken away and the powers that held us captive were defeated (Colossians 2:13–15). In place of the old inscription the Spirit writes a new one, so that believers are “the epistle of Christ”, “written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart” (2 Corinthians 3:3).

Christ also bore the fire. God set him forth as a propitiation (Romans 3:25), and he was made sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). On the cross he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), so that we who were enemies might be reconciled to God (Romans 5:10). Judah lost its heritage, and in Christ we are given an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled and unfading (1 Peter 1:4), and a kingdom which cannot be moved (Hebrews 12:28).

The altars and the high places find their answer in him as well. His one sacrifice leaves every other altar obsolete. He brings his people to the heavenly Mount Zion (Hebrews 12:22–24), where the Father is worshipped in spirit and in truth (John 4:23–24), and the offering he asks of us is our own lives, presented as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1–2). He breaks the hold of sin passed from parents to children and gives a new inheritance of grace to all who believe.

This passage tells the truth about how deep sin goes. It reaches the heart, it can settle into worship itself, and it is passed on to children, who learn what their parents love. Idols today are seldom carved poles on a hill. Anything that takes the first place in our trust and affection, whether wealth, career, relationships, comfort, reputation or our own ability, can stand where Judah’s high places stood. The verses that follow draw the line plainly, setting the curse on the man who trusts in man beside the blessing on the man who trusts in the LORD (Jeremiah 17:5–11).

The passage also shows who God is. He is just, and he keeps his warnings as surely as he keeps his promises. He is the giver, since the land was his gift and Judah was still “my mountain” while he judged it. And he does what lies beyond our strength: where our sin was written, he writes his law by his Spirit on a heart he has made new. The God who sent Judah into exile is the same God who promised them a new covenant and kept that promise in his Son.